Lucknow, May 17 (nditop) A jammed electronic voting machine in Chandauli parliamentary constituency of Uttar Pradesh Sunday continues to hold back the result of just one of the state’s 80 seats.
A senior engineer of Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL), Bangalore, was being driven down from Patna to put the machine in order so that the locked 600-odd votes in the EVM could be brought out to determine the fate of Samajwadi Party nominee Ram Kishun and Bahujan Samaj Party’s (BSP) Kailash Nath Singh Yadav.
According to the state’s deputy chief election officer Atiq Ahmed Siddiqui: “The margin between the two contestants had narrowed down to just about 350, when one of the EVMs got jammed. Locked in the jammed machine are about 600-odd votes, which could make all the difference to the poll outcome on the seat.”
Since the removal of the defect in the EVM required expertise, the state election officials promptly contacted BEL high-ups in Bangalore who in turn directed their engineer in Patna to rush to Chandauli.
It was not as if such a problem arose for the first time in Uttar Pradesh. “We had encountered a similar problem in 2007 and at Mirzapur in 2004, but both were sorted out so there is no cause for worry,” Siddiqui said.